to praise or not to praise

I read through our assigned articles on feedback and tried really hard to make connections to what I do on a daily basis. It was hard, as I seem to be less and less capable of complex thought as spring break gets nearer and nearer. If I give students written feedback on their writing, it's actually in the context of a conversation. We talk back and forth about the work, and I consider anything I write down as "notes" that we can both return to later as we revise. Note that I say "we" revise. Few, if any, of my students know how to revise, much less revise independently. Really, all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming to drafting to editing and revising are shared tasks. Of all the stages of writing, I work most on getting students independent at brainstorming and drafting, so revision is nearly always a "we" process.

But as I read Hyland's article on praise I suddenly had a lot more to think about. Praise, verbal or written, is a tricky thing. As teachers we learn the importance of specific praise as an effective feedback tool (instead of the generic "good job"), but then we hear/read about how praise can demotivate kids. Nothing is ever as it seems. Hyland's description of mitigating devices used in written feedback was particularly interesting. Paired acts (criticism + praise), hedges (words that tone down criticism), personal attribution (couching criticism as personal opinion) and questioning all seem like versions of our infamous Minnesota Nice, even though the article focused on teachers and students at a university in New Zealand. It all made me wonder...what is the purpose of giving students feedback on their writing? Do we want them to feel good about themselves as writers? Do we want them to learn more about the craft of writing? Do we want them to be more self-reflective of their skills as writers? I'm sure the answer is yes to all of those things, but we can't do all of those things at one time. And we can't do any of those things by deflecting our criticism by "sugaring the pill." As Hyland explains, the ELL students in the study had difficulty understanding mitigated comments. ELL students aren't the only ones confused by a combination of praise and backpedaling criticism. We don't want students to feel bad, but avoiding clear, constructive criticism leaves students floundering. Being direct in our comments and feedback is a skill that requires practice. Maybe not everyone needs to work at it, but I certainly do.

Providing Feedback on Student Writing

I read the Ferris article, "Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing," this week and really enjoyed it. It gave me helpful ideas about how to best respond to student work. She writes the article from the perspective of how she helps new teachers learn about and address feedback issues. So it's from a teacher preparation program perspective. It was still very helpful and reading it was timely in that I just finished providing feedback to all of my students personal narratives.

I also really like Ferris's list of guiding principles of written teacher commentary. Here are some principles that Ferris suggests that I didn't do: "refer to previous work and progress that you see", "do not feel that (the teacher) should address every single problem they see on each student paper,"(I did) and "avoid appropriation." On the latter, I find it really difficult, as Ferris says, not to try to make the paper "perfect." And yet instead, I whole-heartedly agree with Ferris, that "the most important end-product, is each student's progress and increasing awareness of and skill in using various strategies to compose, revise, and edit their own work." So, why is it so hard to leave well enough alone?

Some of the things that Ferris suggests in her article that I did/do with my own students writing: make sure "other students comment and provide feedback" (I was not the only one providing any feedback), "provide encouragement and constructive criticism," and "get to know the student through previous work in order to build comments around that."

Later she talks about the kinds of guiding questions that can be used in feedback of student writing. I really enjoy providing feedback to my students. Once they receive the papers back, I conference one on one with them. According to Ferris, this is also a recommended practice. Just like it is better to provide criticism or feedback to someone in person instead of, for example, writing it in an email, I think the same goes for student feedback on writing. Not only should they have it in writing, but also be able to hear if from the teacher. Make it more of a dialogue where the student can clarify, ask questions, and summarize the important points of the feedback.

Wanted: Consensus and Shared Purpose

Bernstein writes that "Even teachers who do not believe that writing instruction should have as its primary focus the development of linguistic competence may find it quite difficult to provide written commentary on content and rhetorical concerns in the manner they believe is effective because of pressure to respond to students' grammatical and lexical errors first and foremost" (p. 65). When I read this I was transported back in time about five years ago.

I was teaching in another French immersion school and we, like all of the other elementary schools in the district, were using a Writer's Workshop model to teach writing in our classrooms. It wasn't easy to do in an immersion setting, but we were experimenting with it and I was pretty impressed with the writing that I saw around the school. Then at a staff meeting one morning our principal said that she was approached by the father of a prospective student. He was a native French speaker and was, our principal said, "shocked" by some of the errors in grammar and spelling that he saw in students' writing displayed around the school. Our principal asked us to go around and correct the errors in our students' work. My colleague in kindergarten complied. She had to. It was like a police state over there. She carefully typed up corrected versions of the things that her kindergartners had written in French and posted them underneath all of her students' work.

I sometimes see the same thing happen where I work now. Students will make signs that advertise upcoming events and there are almost always mistakes in French. A few days after the posters go up, someone goes around and corrects the errors with a black marker. Is this good practice? I don't know. I get both sides. I know it's not good to have incorrect French on display for our students. They don't see French that often outside of school so what they do see at school tends to stick with them, for better or for worse. But all of this correcting also rubs me the wrong way as a teacher who believes strongly in a Workshop model and who believes that students should be allowed and, in fact, encouraged to make mistakes when they are learning to write.

I understand the accountability argument. I asked all of my students to make sure their word wall words were spelled correctly in published work when I taught second grade. And, of course, grammar is important. I try my very best to speak French as authentically as I can. But I also know personally (as a non-perfect French speaker) that nothing inhibits my ability to speak more than fear that I will be judged, not taken seriously or belittled if I make mistakes. I can only imagine that students feel the same way. If we focus on grammar at the exclusion of ideas and content, we are essentially telling our students "Don't speak or write until you can do it perfectly." And no one learns to write or talk like that in their native language. Why would we ever say that to children attempting to communicate in a second language?

What to do? Believe me, I don't know. I've been tiptoeing my way around this conflict for over five years. I do believe, as Bernstein argues, that programs and teachers need to carefully discuss and agree to common philosophies and expectations for writing assessment and instruction. Otherwise, teachers will continually butt heads. It's happening in my school right now. And that lack of clarity or consensus about a shared purpose slowly chips away at a program, and I think everyone ends up feeling discouraged.

Thousands of hours with a green felt tip pen. . .

I read the articles for this week, and though I found them all thought-provoking, the culminating effect of the readings was for me a feeling of discouragement. I know that I have spent thousands of hours reading and responding to student writing, and it seems that my efforts have been somewhat futile. (Not that the essays' conclusions were really surprising to me. A lot of students I've known have admitted to me that they don't really read teacher comments; they are mostly interested in the grade.) I don't think that means that I can give up the practice of written feedback, but hopefully I can be more deliberate with my efforts in the future?

I know I am guilty of "sugaring the pill," as the Hylands put it. In an effort to be positive about students' writing -- and thus help motivate them, I have been guilty of "mitigating my feedback," resulting in "confusion and misunderstanding" when my students don't understand exactly how to revise their essays. I wonder what would happen if I took a new approach, writing only the "negative" comments and suggestions on drafts, and writing only the positive comments on final copies? If my students know to expect this, they would view the negative comments as a form of help, and they would look forward to the positive comments on the final.

The Dohrer essay reminded me of something that I knew but don't always practice: "Research indicates that when teachers make remarks on papers and return those papers to students while offering them no opportunity to revise, the remarks have little effect on subsequent papers." I know that the energy and time I expend in giving my students copious amounts of written feedback is best used on drafts of papers rather than final copies.

Yet one challenge I face is that it's so hard to get my 8th grade students to really invest in their drafts -- when they know there is no grade coming. And I don't like spending my time reading and responding to their writing when I know that they haven't really invested much time and thought yet. How do I get students to invest in the drafts -- so that I can give them feedback to help them improve? When there is a grade involved, of course it's a different story for most Edina students!

I don't know of a good solution for this. This March, I surprised students on the day that their Anne Frank essays were due by telling them that I was collecting the essays not as final copies, but as drafts. I told them that I would return the essays with written feedback, and the revised essays would be a week later. Most students were happy with the news, and while reading the drafts, I felt very encouraged by the quality of the writing. I can't speak to the final copies yet, since I'm collecting them tomorrow! Of course I can't regularly surprise/deceive my students like this -- word would spread! But I also can't bear spending hours of precious time on half-hearted attempts.

Written feedback and Error Analysis

Naming written commentary as "a critical instructional opportunity for both teacher and student," Ferris offers convincing yet cautionary advice in her article, "Preparing Teachers to Respond to Student Writing". I intend to apply these three ideas to my teaching practice:

1. Consider how to use a "judicious mixture of teacher feedback (which can be oral, handwritten, or electronic) , peer review, and guided self-evaluation." (p. 167) While I have used all three practices, I'd like to be more intentional and explicit with students about the purposes of each.

2. Read the paper "from start to finish without marking anything." (p. 170) Yes, I may have to sit on my hands.

3. For English Language learners (as well as other struggling writers), identify, number and chart language errors (similar to a miscue analysis in evaluating reading), followed up with "error conferences" . (pp. 177, 191) Recently, I noticed that one of my ELL students omits the letter s from most plurals and verbs. I wonder what I could discover with more systematic analysis of student writing errors. Error analysis is routine in reading assessment. It makes sense to apply this practice to writing as well. I need to assess/diagnose student needs before addressing them.

For Colored

Girls who

have Considered
Suicide
When The Rainbow
is Enuf

Borderlands
La Frontera
The New Mestiza

Truth is within ourselves, it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inner centre in us all
Where truth abides in fullness; and around
Wall upon wall the gross flesh hems it in
That perfect, clear perception which is Truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds all and makes all error, but to know
Rather consists in finding out a way
For the imprisoned splendour to escape
Than in achieving entry for a light
Supposed to be without.
-Robert Browning

After reading the Goldstein article this week, which was chock full of decent information and many early-primary parallels, I kept going back to the first full paragraph on page 67. Here, the author discusses the interaction of factors that can inform the reception and perception of commentary and revision. In short, the demands of life prevented the student from making the revisions her teacher thought necessary...aaand, the teacher "believed the student to be lazy". Certainly, these demands can be myriad. Goldstein went on to say that we need to be very conscious of what we do -- and why we do what we do -- when we comment on our students' writing. While "grammatical and lexical expertise" (65) have their necessity and merit, concentrating on their virtue could suffocate the voices of multilingual and non-standard English speakers and writers.

Enter, Elizabeth's blog posting. Hooray!

As teachers of writing, we are afforded opportunities to validate the honest voices of our students. Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as the face of our nation joins the larger "mestizaje", those voices will sound less and less like the Western Canon. We are called to consider the beauty and relevance that lies outside the box. Robert Browning would call that beauty "truth".


The two texts, For Colored Girls and Borderlands -- which I have linked at the top of this posting -- were some of the first personal (writing) affirmations I ever encountered.

Written feedback

In my ESL position, all the feedback I give is formative, since I am not in charge of anyone's grades. As I read and reflected on the articles assigned for this week, I tried to tie them in to what I do and found it difficult to make meaningful connections. But I can write about my own experience as a student and teacher.

I always read my teacher's comments eagerly, hoping for positive feedback. I would be disappointed if the only feedback was a letter grade, but knew that teachers were busy people. I don't remember writing conferences or individual help with drafting. The first time I was caught short by a prof was when I was writing independent paper on historiography in college. I was not using an acceptable style, but I had never been taught what that was! I learned a lot from that experience, though, mostly that I wasn't a know-it-all!

I really began teaching writing when I began teaching fifth grade at Creek Valley twenty years ago. It was in the late 80s and I had just read Donald Graves and Ken Koch, the poet, and was very much under their spell. During the 1990s, Creek Valley was an exemplary 'whole language' school with a strong emphasis on process writing. There was the Creek Valley Viewer, where students would publish their stories and poems once or twice a year. Each grade level had their own writing project from second grade memoirs to fifth grade fiction books. We did do writing conferences, using trained parents as well as teachers to give feedback to students. We helped students articulate the heart of their stories. Oh yes, we still taught five paragraph essays in fifth grade and state reports in fourth, but we also gave the students multiple opportunities to explore language and write on their own. We worked a lot on revision--seeing writing through new or different lenses--and a little on editing, so that the work was comprehensible to the reader. It was, indeed, keeping the audience in mind that encouraged decent spelling and punctuation, etc.

I still wrote comments on final drafts in those days before rubrics came to the fore. I suspect, however, they were more for the parent than for the child. The students had received feedback along the way.